The range of haibun is broad and frequently includes autobiography, diary, essay, prose poem,[1] short story and travel journal.
Bashō's shorter haibun include compositions devoted to travel and others focusing on character sketches, landscape scenes, anecdotal vignettes and occasional writings written to honor a specific patron or event.
Traditional haibun typically took the form of a short description of a place, person or object, or a diary of a journey or other series of events in the poet's life.
The first contest for English-language haibun took place in 1996,[11] organized by poet and editor Michael Dylan Welch, and judged by Tom Lynch and Cor van den Heuvel.
[16] Modern English-language haibun writers (aka, practitioners) include Jim Kacian, Bruce Ross, Mark Nowak, John Richard Parsons, Sheila Murphy, Nobuyuki Yuasa,[17] Lynne Reese,[18] Peter Butler,[19] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,[20] and David Cobb, founder of the British Haiku Society in 1990 and author of Spring Journey to the Saxon Shore, a 5,000-word haibun which has been considered seminal for the English form of kikōbun (i.e., travel diary).